Anti-trans sentiment voiced at three board meetings

Editor’s note: The Lincoln Squirrel initially decided not to cover this issue so as not to publicize what I feel are highly misguided and hurtful views. I decided to write this story after the matter came up at a fourth meeting; I felt that not doing so would amount to sweeping an uncomfortable ongoing issue under the rug. We ignore public statements of this type — especially when they consist of blatant hatred and start to be heard from not just individuals but a statewide political party, as recently happened in Colorado — at our peril. 

The LGBTQIA+ community is celebrating Pride Month in June with parades, flags, and in some places (including Lincoln), proclamations of support. But not everyone has been in a celebratory mood — as evidenced when two Lincolnites spoke out in person against transgenderism at public meetings and a third meeting was profanely “Zoom-bombed.”

It all began in the weeks before the Select Board planned to issue its now-annual proclamation that June is Pride Month in Lincoln (see an identical version of the document from 2022 here). Knowing that this was happening in a few weeks, resident Charlotte Trim said at the board’s April 16 meeting that “this Pride proclamation seems to sort of normalize the transgender movement” and asserted that leaked emails from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health revealed that she called “horrifying” findings. Among her claims: that the suicide rate for postoperative transgender people is much higher than that for the rest of the population, and that hormonal therapies for transgender patients cause cancer or sterilization.

“What is being promoted to children in this town that you can choose your gender the way you can choose your career,” Trim said, adding that children being medically treated for gender dysphoria “are going to be sent on a eugenics program” and that “what you are putting forth here is actually a Satanic belief system.” She then asked the board to withdraw its upcoming Pride proclamation. 

Resident David Stubblebine also spoke in support of Trim’s sentiments. “The zeitgeist of the age is to embrace pride, embrace LGBT, embrace transgenderism,” he said. “Young children parading around with rainbow flags — not OK, in my opinion… and the transgenderism thing is 10 times worse… it’s promoting in our town a culture of death, in my opinion.”

Chris Eliot, who also happened to be attending the April 16 meeting via Zoom, took issue with those statements. “I feel that trying to equate the LGBT community and the LGBT movement to a Satanic cult was personally offensive,” he said. Trim tried to respond but was prevented from speaking further by the board.

Trim doubled down at the board’s next meeting on April 30. The Bill of Rights says Americans are “protected from having strange religions forced upon us, which is how it feels… what we seem to be doing is worshiping a pagan god,” she said. She claimed that other parents she had spoken to in town “are not very happy, but they don’t want to speak out because we all know if you speak out, you get punished.”

Reached by the Lincoln Squirrel on April 17, Trim said that she had reached out to Stubblebine and other residents before the April 16 meeting. “I asked them, “are you aware of the reality of what’s actually going down? …It makes the medical experiments that the Japanese did to the Chinese look mild.”

But worse was yet to come. At the Select Board’s May 6 meeting, shortly after a discussion of a planned May 29 Lincoln School procession and gathering to mark the start of Pride Month, someone with a Zoom screen identity of Wyatt Prower (perhaps a variant of “white power”) broke into the meeting with racist and anti-gay slurs. A second voice then displayed an antisemitic image and another of feces superimposed on the gay pride flag.  

“This is a perfect illustration of why we’re doing what we’re doing,” Town Administrator Tm Higgins said just before the Zoom broadcast was briefly suspended.

This is the second time a Lincoln meeting has been Zoom-bombed. In April 2021, someone broke into an online meeting of the Council on Aging board of directors, leaving members dumbstruck even as one of them — Hope White, who is Black — watched and listened in pain.

After the two April meetings, Select Board Chair Kim Bodnar declined further comment, saying in an email, “Lincoln’s Pride Proclamation aims to provide support for our residents and ensures everyone feels valued and full members of our community.”

Finally, at the board’s June 3 meeting, resident Michelle Barnes read a statement decrying the earlier anti-trans comments as “dehumanizing name-calling.” “This may encourage all of us to choose and ask others to choose to fill our public square not with hate speech, disrespect and bullying but instead to bring our best selves to these discussions,” she said. “If we fill our public square with humility, empathy, the benefit of the doubt, and respect for each other’s human dignity, we will create a much more favorable condition for cooperation and inclusion, especially in the context of dissenting views, creating more favorable conditions for them to be genuinely and thoughtfully considered.

“Although we have First Amendment rights to bring hate speech and bullying to our public square, and bullying is an effective strategy for giving more weight to one person’s or one group’s vote, it doesn’t mean it is right to exercise these rights, because the cost of exercising them in these ways is not only the erosion of our ability to cooperatively govern. The cost is also a fracturing of our shared humanity and community,” Barnes concluded.